In response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill innovative UWB radar sensor network imaging methodologies to produce 2-D image based on 1-D signals are under development. Using these techniques beach soil reflectivity can be measured. The differences between the reflectivity of oil spilled beach soil and that of the normal beach soil shows the dielectric property changes due to oil spill. The oil spill has changed the beach soil dispersion, and oil contamination drastically reduces the bearing capacity of sand, which impacts building foundations and may cause building safety issue. In this project, models of the relations between soil reflectivity, oil content, and compression index are under development. The research crosses multiple disciplines, including sensor networks, radars, geoscience and remote sensing, civil engineering and geotechnology, signal and image processing, wireless communications, and pattern recognition; the research team includes four investigators drawn from three departments (EE, Civil Engineering, and CSE). This project promises to generate new results for radar remote sensing and radar sensor network approaches to assessing oil spill impact on beach soil.
Our goal for this project is to apply synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and Ultra-WideBand (UWB) radar sensor network to perform the beach soil dielectric property studies due to the oil spill. My responsibility is to develop solutions for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that can be used for unattended event monitoring and data acquisition. Privacy is one of the major issues that jeopardize the successful deployment of wireless sensor networks. While confidentiality of the message can be ensured through content encryption, it is much more difficult to adequately address the source-location privacy. For WSNs, location privacy service is further complicated by the fact that the sensor nodes consist of low-cost and low-power radio devices, computationally intensive cryptographic algorithms and large scale broadcasting-based protocols are not suitable for WSNs. Our research outcome for this project includes two major areas: research accomplishment, education outcome. Research Accomplishment: 1. We developed quantitative measurement framework to measure, characterize and design privacy-preserving communication schemes for multi-hop networks, including wireless sensor networks in particular. Our proposed criteria can be widely utilized to analyze and evaluate information leakage in network routing protocols. 2. Based on our proposed measurement framework, we developed novel modules and schemes to achieve privacy-preserving communication in wireless sensor networks. We provide comprehensive theoretical and numerical analysis of the modules and schemes on the design tradeoffs between security and efficiency for the proposed modules. 3. We developed novel schemes to provide both content confidentiality and location privacy to prevent the adversaries from tracing back to the message source based on routing path monitoring. 4. We provided theoretical foundation on design trade-offs between security and efficiency, i.e., cost-aware security. In particular, we can determine the best security options for any giving cost criteria. 5. We also investigated jamming attacks to the wireless networks. And we provided a unified jamming model, which can be used to analyze the time varying jamming power spectral density based on our proposed jamming classification scheme. 6. We developed efficient user authentication and key establishment schemes for wireless networks. 7. Secure Attack Detection and Scheme Design: We developed a distributed detection in mobile access wireless sensor networks under Byzantine attacks. We proposed simple but effective sub-optimal linear approaches and derived a near-optimal closed-form solution based on the central limit theorem. We also developed an effective malicious node detection scheme for adaptive data fusion under time-varying attacks; the proposed scheme is analyzed using the entropy-based trust model, and shown to be optimal from the information theory point of view. Education Outcome: 1. Support of graduate students is one of the very important education goals of this project. This project supported on Ph.D. student. He is going to graduate soon. 2. We developed course content for two new courses on wireless security: one undergraduate course (ECE 491: Computer and Communication Security), and one graduate course (ECE 816: Cryptography and Network Security). Both courses are well received.
